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Monday, March 11, 2019

Ottavino, though, is on his own level. During the season, he checks two statistics he believes reflect how he is throwing: first-strike and walk percentages. At the end of the season, he dives deeply into how he threw the ball, using advanced statistics such as xwOBA (expected weight on-base average), which in layman’s terms, essentially measures the quality of the contact made against him.

He labeled other statistics, such as E.R.A. or the scoring percentage of inherited base runners, as faulty.

“We’re trying to strip away all the luck factors so you can be as real with yourself as possible,” he said. “If you’re not doing that, you’re going to ride the roller coaster really bad, and you’re lying to yourself.”

Even if some of Ottavino’s teammates are not quite there yet in terms of the game’s advanced numbers, the Yankees’ robust analytics department is there to help them all break down the multitude of statistics in the game. The players just have to ask.

Friday, January 04, 2019

One month ago, Baseball​ Prospectus​ introduced​ a new total-offense statistic​ called Deserved Runs​ Created Plus​​ (DRC+). Although the site’s related pitching statistic, Deserved Run Average (DRA), has appeared in my Awards Watch columns since 2016 — at times with behind-the-scenes assistance from the statistic’s co-creator, Jonathan Judge — the launch of DRC+ caught me by surprise.

The introduction of DRA in early 2015 addressed a need. Sabermetrics continued, and continues, to struggle with the erratic nature of pitching performances and the challenge of separating pitcher-influenced results from fielder-influenced results. Offensive contributions, by comparison, are more predictable, and our existing alphabet soup of total-offense statistics —OPS+, wRC+, wOBA, and Baseball Prospectus’ own, now deposed, True Average, to name a few— seemed to be doing a sufficient job in capturing it.

That got me thinking about how new baseball statistics gain traction, and about the chances of DRC+ gaining the necessary currency to obtain equal footing with, if not supplant, those other metrics. To find out what can make or break a new statistic, I turned to some of the sabermetric community’s foremost gatekeepers, statisticians and thought leaders for their opinions.

Saturday, December 29, 2018

The 2018 calendar year has been pretty incredible for sports fans. We saw a Winter Olympics and a World Cup, with Norway setting a new record for medals in the former and France’s young stars bursting onto the scene in the latter. In America’s professional ranks, some teams won their first-ever championships, while others kept winning so much we wondered if they’d broken their sport. And in college, the usual suspects continued to dominate.

In commemoration of all the athletic feats we witnessed this year, we wanted to highlight the good (and the bad) of 2018 from a statistical perspective — to put everything into one bucket and see which performances, regardless of sport, will really stand out 10 or 20 years from now. I’ll mainly be sticking to the sports for which we have game-by-game Elo ratings and predictions, so that means a focus on men’s pro and college football and basketball, plus Major League Baseball. (Unfortunately, our club soccer data only goes back to 2016, so it’s difficult to put those numbers into historical context.)

Even using Elo, it isn’t easy to judge teams across sports. In baseball, an Elo rating north of 1600 makes you an all-time great club; in the NBA, it makes you the sixth-best team in the Western Conference. So, to put all the teams on a similar scale, I gathered end-of-season1 Elo marks for every team going back to 2000,2 then ranked how 2018’s crop (any team whose season began or ended in this calendar year)3 ranked relative to their sport’s best of the millennium.

An effort to quantify relative levels of team performance- not all connected to baseball, but still something of interest.

Sunday, November 04, 2018

Before there was Baseball-Reference.com, there was “The Bill James Handbook,” the annual statistical compilation of the baseball season. The “Handbook” still exists, and it’s still wonderful—600 pages of stats and essays and delightful nuggets of information.

As always, the bulk of the book is the player register—career numbers for every player who played in the majors in 2018—but there are sections on managers, team defense, ballpark ratings, the Hall of Fame, leaderboards, pitchers’ repertoires, shifts and much more.

Here are nine fun items from this year’s edition

In case you’re curious involving the contents of this year’s Bill James Handbook, here’s some details taken from it.